“What is it, what does it do and what are best practices?”, I wondered when I heard that I was the designated jury member to chair the digital marketing session...

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EvelyneMusambiWednesday 14, May 2014 02:54 PM

@Evelyne Musambi: It is equally clear that airlines will need to absorb the costs within their business models #IATA #someonetellfly540

Southwest Airlines business model Case Study

A Case for Sports Case Studies in Business School

Business students spend countless hours of their education pouring through case studies and analyzing how organizations might react to challenges. We study value chains, business models, organizational cultures, mergers and acquisitions, and so much more. The case studies that we read generally cover traditional businesses like Southwest Airlines, General Electric, and Netflix.

As a sports fan, though, it would be interesting for schools to branch out and apply business curriculum to the sports world.

Calling for case studies on sports might sound like an attempt to talk about my hobby in class instead of studying professional cases, but teams and leagues would be excellent subjects of case studies. They add complexity to the traditional business model while being particularly relatable to many students.

For example, I recently spent a weekend in Phoenix for a case competition about a baseball contract analysis. While many folks may think that my week was all fun and games, I’m positive that I’ve never applied such a wide breadth of business curriculum to a single project.

General managers of professional teams are constantly forced to make difficult decisions that balance two goals that aren’t necessarily correlated: profitability and winning.

These differing goals already make sports business quite complicated but the fact that the teams invest in human assets that aren’t nearly as predictable as traditional fixed assets further complicates a GM’s job. Traditional business managers have significant control over their primary assets but sports teams can’t necessarily control what their players do in their private life, much of which can emotionally carry over into games.

Specifically, the 2012 Boston Red Sox and 2013 Los Angeles Lakers would make fantastic organizational behavior case studies. In both cases, the teams had spent much of the past decade winning championships and certainly always being in the playoff picture. But then their longtime coaches left and high-dollar free agents were added to the team.

On paper, both teams should have dominated their respective sports, but both had miserable seasons.

The Red Sox clubhouse completely blew up. Players essentially mutinied against their manager, and management ultimately traded away much of its high-end talent.

The Lakers looked like they should roll into the NBA Finals with a phenomenal starting five, but the all-stars spent months simply trying to gel into one cohesive unit.

Source: bschool.pepperdine.edu

Identifying strategic groups in the U.S. airline industry: an application of the Porter model.: An article from: Transportation JournalBook (American Society of Transportation and Logistics, Inc.)

Europe has done it the right way.

by Van_Helsing

By deregulating the market and letting airlines compete or go out of business.
It's revolutionized the way Europeans travel.In less than a decade, the Southwest Airlines revolution has swept through sclerotic Europe like a capitalist hurricane, leaving a fundamentally altered continent in its wake. Low-cost airlines have grown from zero to 60 since 1994 by taking Southwest's no-frills, short-haul business model and grafting on infinitely variable pricing, aggressive savings from the contemporaneous Internet revolution, and the ripe, Wild West opportunities of a rapidly deregulating and expanding market

Part two

by Bartleby_the_Scriv

The purpose of Chapter 11, and a reason why Europe is moving to adopt a version of it, is that it encourages risk-taking by providing firms a safe haven to survive a temporary financial crisis, and a way for creditors to avoid heavy losses through the distress sale of assets. But in the airline industry Chapter 11 is being abused simply to keep in place inefficient surplus capacity. America's airlines have lost $23 billion since 2001, and they look like losing a further $4 billion this year. Unless some airlines are allowed to go out of business, so reducing the over-capacity that is causing carriers to slash prices, the entire industry is endangered by financial failure

Part 8

by crax1983

Technology too may place some constraints on offshoring. Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM argues that some of the tasks currently going to low-cost centres may eventually return because their underlying technologies will evolve in a way that makes economic sense of putting them back in rich countries. At the moment, for instance, customer-service call centres are very labour-intensive. McKinsey says that wages account for 70% of the costs of a call centre in America. That is why they are rapidly shifting to Bangalore, Hyderabad and other Indian cities.
But firms such as AT&T are working on speech-recognition software that might, says Hossein Eslambolchi, AT&T's chief technology officer, soon be good enough to replace a lot of the routine inquiries currently handled in call centres